How can I safely use an un-initialized array in a UITableView and show an empty table

How to prevent crashes when an array is empty and you make a request from a UITableView or UIPickerView?

My current method is to always initialize my arrays before using them with dummy data but I'm not really happy with this method since sometimes the dummy data is not needed and even-worse, sometimes it doesn't even make sense to show the data, in fact most of the time what I want is to show an empty table if there is no data.